An international team of scientists is working to connect human thought patterns to robotic actions. Controlled humanoids present a new world of mobility for some and a disaster clean-up tool for others.

Thousands of high school students from around the world have put their engineering skills to the test at an international robotics contest. "FIRST" is compared to a "Superbowl of the Mind" mixing math, science and technology with competition.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Scott Jasechko used his road trip from Canada to Albuquerque, where he was about to start a graduate program at UNM, to gather water samples.

Less than two years later, his study of those water samples has landed him in Nature, the prestigious science journal. Jasechko is the lead author of "Terrestrial Water Fluxes Dominated by Transpiration," a study that found plants use a vast amount of fresh water in their life cycles, which can help predict future climate change effects on water resources.

That Jasechko, a doctoral candidate in Earth and Planetary Sciences, was published in Nature is "absolutely huge" and "quite remarkable," study co-author Peter Fawcett said. Fawcett, a UNM associate professor, helped supervise Jasechko, along with second co-author Zach Sharp, also a UNM professor. They worked with three scientists from Alberta Innovates, a Canadian research institution.

Fawcett said he can't recall any other graduate student in his 16 years or so at UNM who was lead author on a study in Nature.

The study is "really significant because it tells us that if we actually change vegetation in a significant way, we can really alter the flux of water from the surface to the atmosphere," Fawcett said.

ULSAN, South Korea (AP) — North Korea's weapons program is not the only nuclear headache for South Korea. The country's radioactive waste storage is filling up as its nuclear power industry burgeons, but what South Korea sees as its best solution — reprocessing the spent fuel so it can be used again — faces stiff opposition from its U.S. ally.

South Korea fired up its first reactor in 1978 and since then the resource poor nation's reliance on atomic energy has steadily grown. It is now the world's fifth-largest nuclear energy producer, operating 23 reactors. But unlike the rapid growth of its nuclear industry, its nuclear waste management plan has been moving at a snail's pace.

A commission will be launched before this summer to start public discussion on the permanent storage of spent nuclear fuel rods, which must be locked away for tens of thousands of years. Temporary storage for used rods in spent fuel pools at nuclear power plants is more than 70 percent full.

Undeterred by Japan's Fukushima disaster or recent local safety failings, South Korea plans to boost nuclear to 40 percent of its energy needs with the addition of 11 new reactors by 2024.

PARIS (AP) — A new examination of what is essentially the universe's birth certificate allows astronomers to tweak the age, girth and speed of the cosmos, more secure in their knowledge of how it evolved, what it's made of and its ultimate fate.

Sure, the universe suddenly seems to be showing its age, now calculated at 13.8 billion years — 80 million years older than scientists had thought. It's got about 3 percent more girth — technically it's more matter than mysterious dark energy — and it is expanding about 3 percent more slowly.

But with all that comes the wisdom for humanity. Scientists seem to have gotten a good handle on the Big Bang and what happened just afterward, and may actually understand a bit more about the cosmic question of how we are where we are.

All from a baby picture of fossilized light and sound.

The snapshot from a European satellite had scientists from Paris to Washington celebrating a cosmic victory of knowledge Thursday — basic precepts that go back all the way to Einstein and relativity.